Genetics of Evolution - Mechanisms

Preliminaries

If you are not already familiar with the structure of these exercises, read the Introduction first.

Note

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Contact information

If you have questions about these exercises, please contact Dr. Kevin Middleton (middletonk@missouri.edu) or drop by Tucker 224.

Learning objectives

The learning objectives for this exercise are:

  • Describe and identify the mechanisms by which variation arises and is fixed (or lost) in a population over time.
  • Explain how the processes of drift, natural selection, migration, and mutation can affect the elimination, maintenance or increase in frequency of alleles in a population.

Exploring the assumptions of HWE

Mechanism of selection

- Moving population average
- Drift vs. selection
  • Effect of sample size on selection and drift in phenotypic evolution
    • Drift as sampling error
    • Drift has a larger effect in small populations

Populations have significant underlying variation

Intuition of moving mean

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References